Well as TechEd 2010 draws to a close this year in Australia, I had a great time getting away from it all and certainly experiencing a couple of firsts. For me this was one of the better TechEd’s I had been to – the sessions were a little light on, but the labs + exams made up for that big time.

So Scotty and I developed an Integration Pre Conference Training Session aimed at working out which MS Integration technology to run where – unscrambling the mess. We got a great turn out for the training in terms of numbers – we beat SharePoint 2010 dev + admin!!! :)

For all of you whom I had the pleasure of training this week – well done! I hope you enjoyed it and it was great sharing that time with you. The sun, sand, BizTalk and Azure…what could be better?? :)

Well folks, after a recent week of performance issues running a SharePoint 2010 VM image (40GB) on Virtual Box (v3.0.14 & v3.2.8) Olaf (a fellow Breezer) and I sat down and put our thinking caps on as how to improve things.

- Hyper-V wasn’t an option due to classroom setups and portability issues.

After scouring the forums, posts, blogs and other to see how to squeeze every last bit of performance from Virtual Box – I’ve come to the conclusion that current versions just don’t take full advantage of Core i7 architectures, hence they run dog slow (1 virtual cpu seems to run better than multiple).

Enter VMWare – I’m relatively new to the world of VMWare, although others on my team swear by it.

So I downloaded VMWare Player (free)

And configured a Virtual Machine (or two)

So the issue is (as I’m sure you’re well aware if you’re reading this), is that booting up Windows 2008 R2 (in my case), the native disks are SCSI and we get the dreaded Inaccessible Boot Device error (stop 0x7B).

(Back in WinXP, Win2000 & Win2003 (I think) there *used* to be a recovery option that you could repair my boot environment and it would ‘rediscover’ all the disks etc and you’d be on your way)

The aim is boot into Windows, allow it to discover, load and install the VMWare SCSI drivers (from LSI…) and then in theory you’re good to go.

After drilling down through the VMWare forums (a foreign place for me), there’s a few articles on ‘injecting drivers’ into the system, startup etc – none of these techniques worked for me (I booted to Repair window and ran regedit to ‘tweak’ some startup registry keys).

Still stuck and after many hours we noticed that CD/DVD (IDE) was an available device on the system as follows:

I thought “I wonder if I can attach the VHD as an IDE??”

After locating the VMWare VM config file – a *.VMX file I saw a couple of entries…

As we’re all aware there’s more than one road that leads to Rome when dealing with integration. When to use SSIS? For what? What about MSMQ? AppFabric and BizTalk etc.

At TechEd this year I’ve decided to run some preconference training dealing with this exact issue across many different Microsoft Integration Technologies.(This is one of the biggest questions I get from customers)

If you’re heading to the Gold Coast this year, then this training is before TechEd – get up a couple of days early and then be fully charged and armed with all your questions….

There is no silver bullet for application integration. Different situations call for different solutions, each targeting a particular kind of problem. While a one-size-fits-all solution would be nice, the inherent diversity of integration challenges makes such a simplistic approach impossible. To address this broad set of problems, Microsoft has created several different integration technologies, each targeting a particular group of scenarios.

Come on a 2-day adventure examining each of these technologies and reviewing the When, Why's and How's on each, with their own distinct role to play with integrating applications. When you come through the other side you'll be able to slot each of these technologies into a *practical* use.

This developer workshop is based on real world examples, real world problems and real world solutions.

Join me and be prepared to roll up your sleeves and unravel the maze that awaits....

I’m in the process of planning a SP2007 to SP2010 ‘migration’ moving over the content database and other web artifacts.

I was making sure all things were ticked off and available in the new SP2010 environment such as – additional external scripts, paths, externally accessible images, webparts + flash movie files.

Migrated over – fired up the browser and after some minor tweaking most things came over, except for the flash movies.

The flash movie was not being displayed.

So naturally you think – must be a path, permission, activeX, flash object declaration, upload or even a masterpage might need a tweak…

Fired up FireBug in firefox and went to work – we could access the *.swf file directly from within the browser, but when the Page loaded with the link in there… no go.

In fact we got a ‘304 not modified’ response within FireBug – which seems pretty normal if the flash player already has the movie locally and it’s just comparing the server version versus the local…but still no flash playing.

The eagerly anticipated SharePoint 2010 Bootcamps are underway in Australia, and here’s what some of the excitement is about. Technical training this year is all about value for money. After the change in the economy, customers are more careful about where their training budget is being allocated. This year, customers need technical training that is relevant and an investment to their business. They are looking for knowledge that will improve business efficiencies, provide real world scenarios and give students the confidence to be hands-on when they leave the classroom.

The new Breeze SharePoint 2010 Bootcamp has been designed to provide just that. Our customers asked for an in-depth, technical, customized course that, if they were to spend $$s on just one SharePoint2010 course this year, would give them enough knowledge of the technology to build real world solutions.

These bootcamps have been written for the ITPro & Developer who need to upgrade their SharePoint skills, or are just starting out with SharePoint 2010.

There’s an Octopus named ‘Paul’ that’s predicted 5 from 5 of Germany’s last results (wins + losses), with his previous success rate for the Euro 2008 being 80% where he wrongly predicted Germany would beat Spain and Spain won.

Now, with the Semi finals very close, the Octopus has predicted Spain to win.

Essentially his prediction is – they drop 2 cubes each with the nations flag on it, and in the cubes they have his ‘dinner’ (a muscle). The cube he opens the lid to first and eats the muscle is his prediction.

As you know I’m a big fan of Virtual Box being able to run my x64 VMs on my Win7 machine. Yay!!

So armed with my trusted new Core i7/8 GB laptop – I figured the VMs will be cooking on this new kit…

After installing the lastest VirtualBox (3.2.0) I was away – only to notice the machines were running like a SLUG! (I actually have a cat that has the nick name ‘slug’ and this machine was slower than her)

After waiting a full 20mins (still booting - ‘loading windows files…’ etc) my machine Blue Screened for a millisecond and then rebooted.

So I rolled up my sleeves and started digging – could be the VHD, the bios, the machine, the 1000 and 1 settings…

On the Binding Wizard Screen select sapBinding and configure the appropriate connection string details such as:

string

sapUri = "sap://CLIENT=800;LANG=EN;@A/sapsrv/00?GWHOST=sapsrv&GWSERV=sapgw00&RfcSdkTrace=true";<You need to stick your own sapURI above - that is more or less a sample>

Click on the Connect and under RFC->OTHER , select RFC_READ_TABLE (or you can type it in the box to search)

Click Ok to generate the proxy and other details.

Either your BizTalk Project or your non-BTS project has now all the relevant details to communicate to SAP.

I tend to build out all this functionality first in a Console App just so I know what is needed within the BTS environment, also I find it much quicker to test/debug etc. here.

Ok - onto the code. I've got 2 routines for you, one that uses the Proxy Classes built by the wizard in the last step, and a routine from 'first principles'.

One of the things that I really like about the BTS Adapter Pack and certainly in this case, is that depending on the shape of the XML you pass to the adapter, it determines the table and type of operation that it is to do.

Both of these examples below you could wrap into a functoid/helper/whatever and use directly from code.

Proxy Code - version 1 - here I define some parameters and make a straight call to the table CSKS. NOTE: Use FieldNames not Field Labels (took me a few hrs on that one ;)